Continuing on from the last day . . .

The difference between community, in the traditional sense in which I have described it, and what passes nowadays for community—the accident of people happening to live in a particular location—is that if confronted with a threat the traditional community might be expected to react together in the face of it.  As opposed to the probable reaction of its modern ersatz equivalent, which would be to shatter under impact, like a glass vase dropped on a concrete floor, and scatter in its shards into the mythical security of self-sufficiency.

I have known of instances where a handful of people have come together within a community, of their own volition, to help look after a sick or elderly individual, not for reward or praise, but simply because it was the right, and to them natural, thing to do.  In the instances I am talking off, it would have been animated by a sense of organic connection with the individual concerned, whom they would have known as part of their community from earliest childhood.

Yet such a thing, such a sense of ongoing connection, is becoming so much rarer in our days, as signalled in the onward march of the ‘home help’.

Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto of how the rise of capitalism ‘left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”’.  One might equally say the same of modern social development, and the way it has undermined the traditional bonds and affections of community.

The people I mentioned earlier would have carried out much of the duties of ‘home helps’, and had they been of necessity pressed to it, probably of ‘carers’, too.  They would have seen it as their responsibility, a responsibility alloyed with a certain sense of affection too.

Now I’m not being critical of ‘home helps’.  Their existence is simply a reflection of the way society has gone.  Most of them, no doubt, do a very good job; and most of them would have some degree of feeling for those they deal with.  Yet the fact is that when you need to replace something that in previous times would have been the natural and unforced expression of communal solidarity with something that needs instead the incentive of cash payment, then a significant and ongoing social change has to be involved.

Now I have to hold my hands up here and say that, whatever about kin, I certainly have no skin in the game.  Personally, I would be most reluctant to being looked after in my dotage by anyone, volunteer or otherwise.  Nor would I be necessarily in the forefront of the rush to help, should such a thing be required.  But that’s the way I am.  Rather, as I said in a much earlier context, I am casting myself in the role of observer, rather like the guy in the stands who may have a much clearer idea of what’s going on down on the pitch, than those actually playing.  But then, again, maybe not.

What engages me is the belief that we need urgently to rescue whatever can be rescued from the old structures of community.  And not just in terms of looking after the elderly or the sick either, which is something I will come to in the third and final part of this mailing, whenever I get to it.

In the meantime, I was pleasantly surprised to see an article in last week’s Sunday Times about a charity—despite my innate suspicion of anything bearing the term ‘charity’—in Britain called HelpForce, that would have certain similarities to what I am in the process of outlining.  Though there would be differences, too, especially in relation as to how it would fit in with the optimum size of communities, as discussed in my previous mailing.

In any event, I will try to bring the strings together in my next and final mailing in the topic—as I say, whenever I get around to it.

The loss of the organic . . .

Ernest Hemingway wrote that a man on his own has no chance.  So isolating oneself in expectation of disaster is never going to work.  It is like survivalists in America, building retreats in the woods in face of some anticipated apocalypse.  They might as well put up signposts saying ‘here be food and guns’.  Because really that is what they are doing, stockpiling things for others much tougher—and there’s always someone tougher—to take off them.

And yet we live in a world beset by war and rumours of war and the threat of all sorts of economic, ecological and other disasters.

So what is one supposed to do, other than hide one’s head under the blankets?

For a long, long time now, I have believed that communities need to deliberately foster a local resilience, not necessarily in expectation of disaster, yet that will stand them in good stead should disaster in any event come.  It is more than simply a matter of community spirit, though such a thing is important in itself; it is rather a deliberate policy of looking at things in terms of the community as a whole and seeing what needs to be and what can be done on a practical level to insure the ongoing health and survivability of the social organism.

Now when I talk of community here, I am talking of localities and the people who live in them—and not in the nowadays fashionable terms of communities of this and communities of that—the gay community, the immigrant community, the journalistic community, the faith community and all other such neologisms.

For the fact is that real communities have traditionally been at the the root of healthy societies.  Neglect such roots and the whole social structure is quite likely to come down, not immediately, but perhaps suddenly, when placed under challenge, like a rotten tree in a storm.

In the same sense as studies have shown that the most effective committees occur within the range of 4 to 8 members—above or below that and efficiency begins immediately to taper off—so also there seem to be parameters for community.  These parameters suggest that the upper and lower limits for effective communities lies between 100 and 250 individuals, with the optimum number set around 150. And there seems to be historical evidence as well as scientific evidence to underline these conclusions.

It seems also that these figures refer only to adult acquaintances, so that the numbers can be inflated upwards by allowing for children.

The same research tends to show that the individual human being can really only organically integrate with others within these same parameters.  And it is these parameters that control the possibility of forming true communities: communities which act like mutual-aid and mutual-defence societies, where everyone knows everyone else, and each can depend on the backing of the rest in the general vicissitudes of life, as they effect the community.

It is exactly such circumstances that allow for the development of community-based institutions that involve a high degree of trust, such as credit unions.  Where credit unions stray beyond the boundaries of such long-accumulated local knowledge and experience, they often tend to run into trouble.

Yet the fact is that the existence of such communities is becoming less and less a reality—what with ease of transport and immigration and town-to-country and country-to-town migration.  It would be comparatively rare to find a community nowadays that has been allowed enjoy its own slow process of natural fermentation undisturbed by at least some of the factors mentioned above.

Yet at the same time one can’t turn back the clock, no matter how much is being lost in this process of, if you like, social and cultural ‘globalisation’.  The best that can be done is, like shipwrecked sailors, to try and rescue what can be rescued from the disaster.  Especially in a world, the way it is, that may not allow for very much time.

More anon . . .

Waiting for the ‘Off’!

Paganism didn’t just shrivel and die in the face of a victorious Christianity in 4^th century Rome.  Exhausted as it was, it still required a sequence of state edicts to finally put it out of its misery.  A significant additional element was the upsurge of Christian mobs intent on enforcing the decrees by violence.

But what goes around comes around; and it would seem nowadays that Christianity, and especially the Catholic Church, is facing a similar fate.  Certainly, the mob seems to be already there and primed; it just hasn’t turned to direct violence yet.

The only real difference between mobs is the accident of their motivations, the particular targets that animate them.

Clausewitz, in the process of cataloguing the different human types, speaks of ‘those who are very easily roused, whose feelings blaze up quickly and violently like gunpowder, but do not last.’

Frustrated, angry, unthinking, reactive, and as unconsciously aggregative as those headcases you see milling outside courthouses during high-profile arraignments.  Easily influenceable, too.

Farmed salmon are not naturally red; the colour is artificially created by means of dyes added to their food.  So also with the excitables, who are tuned into all the channels, and draw their nourishment from them; their programming, too.

‘The longest suicide note in history . . .’

There has been a hiatus of over a week since my last mailing.  It is not that here has been nothing to say, for there always is, but rather that there has been nothing that demanded immediate saying.  And that is the way it is going to be ongoing.  There will be periods of intermittent silence; and periods of a more regular mailing.

In the meantime, just some rules of thumb.

Don’t look at situations in isolation, stand back and look at them in terms of their potential consequences.  These various campaigns we are inflicted with nowadays always try to pass themselves off as ‘stand-alone issues’, things that need to be addressed for ostensible reasons of justice or compassion or just a warm, muzzy sense of fellow feeling.  But if the past few years should have taught us anything, it is that this is never actually the case.  Each cause won immediately spawns a new one, or new ones.  Each successful campaign always carries a stinger.

The strategists behind such campaigns piece-feed the public in such a way as to get them to accept piece-by-piece things which otherwise presented in their totality they would rebel against.

The second thing to realise is that no one ever fights for equality.  They may say they do, they may even believe it, but only up to the moment they enter the winning straight, at which stage thoughts begin to turn to establishing control and overall mastery—or in the case of at least one of the battle fronts facing us, ‘mistressy’.

In the famous words of the 1983 British election campaign, quoted in the title of this mailing, our tendency to fold for whatever reason in the face of the relentless onslaught of progressivist liberalism is representative, not of a march towards some secularist New Jerusalem, but rather to somewhere much more questionable.

And such has always been the case.

Another from the vaults . . .

[This is something I wrote in March 2016, and I publish it now simply because it has, in part, a certain current relevance with regards to the American economic blockade of Iran, though you will have to go down a fair piece in what is a rather long article to find the relevant bit.]

Cormac Lucey, a lecturer in finance at UCD, a former special advisor to Michael McDowell during the latter’s time in government, and a regular Irish columnist in the Business Section of the Sunday Times, wrote on the 28^th February 2016.

‘Consider recent remarks from Peter Sutherland, a former attorney-general, EU commissioner and chairman of AIB and Goldman Sachs International.  He has stated, regarding the current refugee crisis: “The United States, or Australia and New Zealand, are migrant societies and therefore they accommodate more readily those from other backgrounds than we do ourselves, who still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others.  And that’s precisely what the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine.”

‘Sutherland suggests the EU should undermine nationality and any sense of nationality.  No wonder the Brits think about leaving.  The wonder is that more aren’t considering joining them.  And the wonder is that we don’t harbour greater resentments against the EU for its authoritarian rejection of democratic referendum results here—see the treaties of Nice and Lisbon.’

There is nothing surprising in this.  One would need to be blind not to see the way things have been heading over many years, certainly since the European Charter on Human Rights was made legally binding in the EU in 2009 under the Treaty of Lisbon, and indeed much earlier.  The Treaty of Lisbon, as noted above, was one of those treaties that the EU insisted on bringing back before the electorate until they got the ‘yes’ that they wanted.

I have been intending for a while now to write something on this, especially as there is a very interesting historical precedent, as it were, to what is going on now.  I have been reading around the issue, purely by accident, these past two years, and it really just a matter of collating the different notes that I’ve made, whenever I get around to it.

The point I am trying to deal with here is somewhat different, though related.  Part of my reading over the past two years has involved rereading The Iliad, in the course of which one particular sentence pulled me up short.  It is where Priam, the king of Troy, comes in secret to beg the body of his dead son Hector from Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors.

Achilles was the only son of Peleus.  And Priam says to him of his father back in Greece: ‘No doubt the countrymen roundabout plague him, with no one there to defend him, beat away disaster’.  And it immediately fills in a picture of the Heroic Age in Greece, where one’s power and one’s possessions depended purely on one’s ability to hang on to them, to the extent that even the father of the great Achilles, in his son’s absence, and in the absence of any other sons, wasn’t likely to be safe.

Francis Parkman, in The Oregon Trail, the story of his life among the Indians in the 1840s, tells an analogous story.  He lived among the Oglala Sioux, and writes that ‘Courage, address [stature, appearance] and enterprise may raise any warrior to the highest honour, especially if he be the son of a former chief, or a member of a numerous family, to support and avenge his quarrels . . . Very seldom does it happen, at least among these western tribes, that a chief attains to much power, unless he is the head of a numerous family.’

Parkman recounts the career of one chief, who had thirty sons, and who ruled the village like a tyrant.  ‘His will was law . . . When he had resolved on any course of conduct, he would pay to the warriors the compliment of calling them together to deliberate upon it, and when their debates were over, quietly state his own opinion, which no one ever disputed.  It fared hard with those who incurred his displeasure.  He would strike them or stab them on the spot; and this act, which if attempted by any other chief would have cost him his life, the awe inspired by his name [and by the number of his sons] enabled him to repeat again and again with impunity.’

He was succeeded by his son, the possessor now of twenty-nine brothers, not to mention other close kinsmen, who acted with much the same impunity.  ‘Out of several dozen squaws he had stolen, he could boast that he had never paid for one, but snapping his fingers in the face of the injured husband, had defied the extremity of his indignation, and no one had yet dared to lay the finger of violence upon him . . . His enemies did not forget that he was one of thirty warlike brethren, all growing up to manhood.  Should they wreak their anger upon him, many keen eyes would be ever upon them, and many fierce hearts thirst for their blood.  The avenger would dog their footsteps everywhere.  To kill Mahto-Tatonka would be an act of suicide.’

I quote this not so much to show the power of the large family as to show the inherent weakness and potential humiliation of the small one.
And so it would appear was the case also among the Greeks of the Heroic Age, the difference being that the Greeks had advanced to the stage of the ownership of farms and estates.  But equally so, the securing and the possession of such estates became, it seems, dependent on sexual fertility and the weight of numbers.  The idea of title or deed or right, even if such things existed, seems to have carried little weight.

Arguably the redress for this situation came with democracy and the development of law and of the state.  Now the possibility existed of people being confirmed in the title to their property.  And the state provided the muscle to make its rulings stick.

But still, one must imagine, the old hunger for mastery and possession, no matter how constrained, continued to exist within the human heart.   Indeed, it seems innate to humanity.

I remember when we were in Turkey, talking to an old doctor who had retired home from America, and asking him about the farmlands of the Anatolian plain.  You could see it from the train.  Miles after miles of flat land, as far as the eye could see, without fence or ditch or marker, and here and there, in the dawn light, some old fellow in a djellaba, tending a herd of goats.  And I asked the doctor how one knew his land from the other.  And his reply was, ‘They know, they know!’

And the secret struggle for mastery continues on in a subdued form even under our noses.  The fellow who strings a fence impinging a couple of inches into his neighbours land.  The amount of land is negligible, but what is important is the gaining of the psychological upper hand.  If you get away with it this time, then you might get away with a bit more the next.  Especially in the legal context of precedence, where if you get away with a thing unchallenged on one occasion, you can often claim it as a justification for the next.

And this brings us to the nub of the matter.  The desire for mastery and possession and putting one’s foot on the other’s neck hasn’t disappeared.  It has just changed its form—and all the more so it seems these past few years.  Kavanagh wrote in Tarry Flynn about Tarry going into a bookshop, and while he bought a book of poems, his companion Eusebius bought an ordinance survey map, and the result of it is that Tarry’s family ends up losing a field.  Now it doesn’t make sense—but that’s the way Kavanagh chose to tell it.  But it is indicative of what it is that I’m trying to say.

The very thing that helped curb predatoriness in ancient times has now become the vehicle of a new breed of predator.  Not guys fit for violence and with big families backing them up, but generally more wimpy types of characters backed up by an adventurous knowledge of the law.  As the law has exponentially swelled and grown ever more complex, the more so it has allowed the clever and the greedy and the unscrupulous to use it as a weapon of aggrandisement.  As Woody Guthrie wrote in The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd, ‘Some will rob you with a six-gun/Some with a fountain pen.’

Armed with an intricate knowledge of the law, whether their own or expensively bought, there is a whole cohort of people out there intent on using it without conscience as a way of getting even richer than they already are.

There are what are called ‘activist shareholders’ who force themselves onto the boards of public companies with the sole intention of maximising the share of profits going to shareholders, no matter what otherwise the consequences may be.

When the Argentinian economy collapsed in the early 2000s, the government did a deal with bondholders that involved them taking a haircut of up to 70%.  American vulture funds which had bought up some of this debt cheaply used American law to force the Argentinian state to pay full dollar on the bonds, on pain of the country being effectively shut out of world financial markets.

It is clear too that the American state has been milking the European banks for alleged breaches of American law with swingeing fines, which the banks have no option but to pay or else lose their licence to trade in US dollars and effectively go out of business.

Jeremy Warner, writing in the Daily Telegraph in 2015:  ‘America, land of the free and all that, is at heart a deeply protectionist nation, which as UK banks have discovered to their cost operates a rotten, asphyxiating legal system that often practises little short of outright extortion.  Certainly, it is hard to call it justice.  If you want to do business in the US, expect to get whacked at some stage, and if you are fool enough not to take your punishment with a smile and fawning thanks for the privilege, they will simply close you down.’

Of course, it is hard to have sympathy for banks, yet it is nonetheless the case that the slurry-tank nozzle reaches down via them into the most ordinary of pockets.  Indeed, the activity of the predators exists at all levels of the pond—from the rarified level of high finance down to the bottom-feeding process of extorting directly from mortgage holders and people who have found themselves in hock to the banks and whose debts have been sold on.

And it stretches to more than just the financial system.  Modern financial imperialism—especially, it seems, American financial imperialism—hides in the guise of a new definition of democracy—what Hilary Clinton calls the ‘new decency’—as its preferred mode of dress.  It is something that it seems to find, for whatever reason, particularly appropriate.  This is a democracy that is no longer primarily about gaining a majority of votes, but instead about delivering the liberal agenda and the cosmopolitan lifestyle.

A sort of: ‘One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them/One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them’.  You can have all the votes you want, but if you do not go along with the legal and lifestyle changes required then you will not be accounted a democracy.  You may not as yet be bombed, but you will certainly be subject to economic and financial pressures sufficient to make you yield.

Marx wrote of capitalism in The Communist Manifesto of 1848: ‘The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.  It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves.  In one word, it creates a world in its own image.’

It would be possible to adapt this for the modern age: ‘The global financial stranglehold is the heavy artillery with which it batters down the Chinese and other walls, with which it forces the barbarians intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.  It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the liberal Western cosmopolitan way of life; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become liberal and cosmopolitan themselves.  In other words, it creates a world in its own image.’

One from the vaults . . .

[This was written by me, as will become obvious at the bottom, some three and a half years ago.  I can’t remember what exact circumstances gave rise to it.  In any event, I have decided to use it anyway as filler.]

Many ancient Greeks, including Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides, had great difficulties with the manner of the development of democracy in Athens.  Despite significant changes in the traditional structures of power, it was the attitude of the democrats—or some of them anyway—a perceived attitude of arrogance and insolence—that seems to have rankled most of all.

Nothing surprising here.  Ruling elites have always tended to resent incursions by the lower orders into their traditional areas of power; and this resentment has often focused on incidentals such as the uncouthness and lack of manners etc. of the new arrivals.

At the same time, it is also recognised that sudden rises in status can often cause people to lose the run of themselves.  Indeed, it is arguably an inherent human trait.  Think of certain people who have won the Lotto, for instance.  A succinct and modern take on the political side of the problem is provided in a cameo scene in David Mamet’s 1991 film Homicide.

The old saying about ‘beggars on horseback’ has a special reference here.  Indeed, it is a saying that, in one form or another, might have a provenance going back as far as ancient times, the matter of having or not having a horse being a dividing line between the gentleman and the commoner.  Eli Sagan, the American sociologist, described how any sudden release of social repression was likely to lead to a splurge of pent up frustration on the part of those previously repressed, which might well cause them to ‘ride to the devil’ in celebration of their new found freedoms.

Something like this happened in Italy in the aftermath of the First World War.  Italy had entered the war belatedly, hoping to gain territorial advantage from it; and although they ended up on the side of the victors, the experience of the army was, like a foretaste of its fate-to-be in the next war, one of defeat, frantic retreats and mass desertions.  The traditional right-wing parties and the extreme left-wing parties (including Mussolini) had supported Italy’s entry into the war.  The main opponents had been the Socialist Party.

In the wake of the war the socialists turned on the army, especially on the officer corps.  It was naked class aggression, the officers being mainly representative of the upper classes.  Officers in uniform were attacked, spat upon, had to be rescued from hostile crowds, had their medals torn from their chests etc. etc.  One consequence of it was to drive them to a great extent into the ranks of the fascists—though logically most of them would probably have ended up there anyway.

Yet the reaction of the socialists—or the more vociferous of them anyway—represented less a protest against the war than what might be seen as a premature celebration of victory.  Rather like St Paul in the aftermath of Jesus, the socialists expected with absolute certainty the imminent arrival of the revolution.  Russia had lit the powder keg and it was only a matter of time—and a very short time at that—before it detonated in Italy.  By the election of 1919 the socialists had increased their share of the national vote to 32% and tripled their number of deputies, seeing, in the words of one historian, ‘parliament mainly as a forum for barracking and abuse ahead of the anticipated revolution.’

As it turned out, of course, they were wrong.  They had become victims of their own propaganda.  Rather than the future being red, it was decidedly black.

There is another old saying: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick!’  On the face of it, it is somewhat opaque.  But really the ‘big stick’ means power—and the proof of having power is that you don’t need to advertise the fact.  It is the people who speak loudest who generally have the least power, and are trying to compensate for it by making the most noise.  Not only are they trying to convince the world that they have ‘stick’, they are all the more desperately trying to convince themselves.

This may have a relevance to current events in Ireland.

20 February 2015